Hostility to immigration looks likely to decide the outcome of the Australian election

The opposition leader says he wants to see "zero" boatloads of immigrants

... What does it mean for Australia and the world if the Liberal-National coalition resumes office after a six-year gap? A victory for Mr Abbott would confirm a trend that affects many rich countries, which is that hostility to immigration is starting to shift votes. The opposition leader says he wants to get to a position where there are “zero” boatloads of would-be immigrants arriving in Australia each year.

I wonder how different are the attitudes toward immigration of Rupert Murdoch's media properties in Australia and the U.S.?

36 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I wonder if those Muslim riots that took place in Sydney not too long ago swayed public opinion. I remember reading the comments to the articles about the riots in some Australian newspapers and couldn't get over how many of them were basically saying "I am as liberal as they come but we need to kick out these violent Muslim ingrates!". Or to not let them in in the first place.

I don't know if this means there is hope for Australia but this is a good sign.

lolz, come on Steve. Australia receives at most 10,000 boat people per year, while total immigration is 130,000 per year, a huge number for a country of 30 million. Did Australia's conservatives say a peep about reducing legal immigration? No, of course not. We all know that white nations are not for white people. Let's not pretend elections are actually mechanisms by which the "racist" masses can affect policy on that untouchable precept. You know this Steve,so I'm curious as to why you take these news and pretend they actually portend anything other than that the theater rolls on?

The boat people issue was a pure misdirection, just showing how nieve the Australian electorate is.

Boat people represent a tiny fraction of Australian immigration, less than 3%. The rest are legal migrants on business, student, skilled workers and family reunion visas that fulfil requirements to stay.

If anything the conservatives are even more pro immigration as the business class desperately wants cheaper skilled labour and more people to maintain the housing bubble.

i think the carbon tax thing is what won the election for australian conservatives. but yes they were also openly anti-immivasion.

that carbon tax thing in australia was like PPACA here. except australia is still a unified, mono ethnic historical nation where politics can still be a part of politics, if that makes sense. political issues can still be much more important than bloc voting, and a big political issue can overcome anything else. there aren't enough entrenched bloc voters there. yet.

we're probably beyond the point of that ever being the case again in the US.

Ironically, the (mostly false) perception that Australia is actually moving to be tougher on immigration may be a lever by which other countries in turn toughen up their own immigration policies. This is most likely contra the intent of the MSM.

A huge vote for stopping illegals is clearly a proxy for slowing legal migration. The politicians are not fools; they know that persisting with large scale legal migration of non-white people into a white country is not going to be a vote-winner.

The center-right party won the Australian federal election because of widespread antipathy to the Laboor party, mostly created by feminist Julia Gillard's ideologically unsound leadership. Her linebackers, that Emily's List of quota-fillers, have been conspiring to turn a party that was once the proud champion of the working class into a feminist roadshow.

Gillard's Labour had become the Feminist Party, with former Attorney General Nicola Roxon, former Health Minister Tanya Plibersek and former Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin acting as Gillard's feminist tackle guards. Kevin Rudd, who was both her predecessor and her successor, had fingers too morally and politically soft to plug the holes in the Labour dike.

In other words, Gillard damaged the credibility of the Labor movement - and lost the election for Labour - by pursuing her feminist agenda. It wasn't because of immigration reform at all.

Had Gillard been capable of wise and just leadership and become PM on a genuine desire to champion the working classes, her successor might have been able to salvage this election. Unfortunately for Labour, the ideological corruption was too great to fix. This election was lost long ago.

Make no mistake, Australians chose against feminist governance. Let's hope the Americans have the sense and the stones to do the same when Hilary Clinton taints her shot.

i think abbott is going to increase non-refugee stream migration. don't sing the praises of this man, steve. he was instrumental in railroading the only serious nationalist party this country has had in recent times.

The newspaper in the link (The Independent) is British, not Australian.

The article's headline thesis I would say turned out to be wrong, and is also presented misleadingly, since the contentious issue in Australian politics has been, not immigration as such, but political refugees from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka... who come via boat from Indonesia. There have been many sinkings, and over a thousand have drowned.

What Australia fears, is an *uncontrolled* flow of people into the country. As another commenter has noted, there is quite a high rate of legal immigration. There is some grassroots resistance to this, from a combination of populists and environmentalists, but zero immigration currently has no support in the political mainstream.

What Australia fears, is an *uncontrolled* flow of people into the country. As another commenter has noted, there is quite a high rate of legal immigration. There is some grassroots resistance to this, from a combination of populists and environmentalists, but zero immigration currently has no support in the political mainstream.

That is not to say that if a mainstream party were to adopt a massive reduction in immigration or moratorium, it would not be an election winner. It is just that we have not been given the choice yet.

"The newspaper in the link (The Independent) is British, not Australian."

The Indie is a sad tale. Founded (I think) in the 1980s as a genuinely non-aligned newspaper, it soon turned into a Guardian clone, lost money and is now owned by the same Russian oligarch who owns the London Evening Standard.

Why hasn't that happened yet? because the business class would kill it!!!

They would sic the media on any party that advocates immigration control and destroy it.

I wish I could be happy about these elections but I agree with the skeptics here. It won't make a damn bit of difference.

Abbott will also cave on gay marriage. He'll get slut-shamed into making an about-face and Oz will have gay marriage, as the US will have by 2015.

I wonder how many other people out there are as disgusted and totally turned off by electoral politics as I am. Back in the day I used to be hopeful when a conservative was elected. Now I just yawn. Distance and dispassion are the proper responses of the adult to the modern world.

Steve, certainly here in the usa, the democratic party is most focused on increasing the number of genetically low iq immigrants. Such immigrants will reliably vote democratic for generations in the future.

In australia are there any political parties advocating for more low iq immigrants? I suspect not. I suspect the debate in australia is whether to invite millions of high iq chinese immigrants or whether to restrict entrance of high iq chinese

I am not an expert in the australian labor market, but have been told that for tough hard young men there are hundred thousand dollar a year jobs in mining camps. However for soft metrosexual artsy young men, there is a super high cost of living and rampant unemployment in sydney. Huge bifurcation in the market, Can australians confirm this

From Britain I can confirm that the BBC, who legally are required to be impartial but make no attempt to be so, are absolutely livid about this result.

Another major policy difference was that the Liberals (in Australia Liberalism means what the originators of the term meant - believing in liberty of thought, speech and economy not American/UK Pseudoliberalism) don't accept the catastrophic warming lie and the parasitism it produces.

I would assume that hbd is more understood and accepted in australia than in the usa. The usa experiences a relatively small black white iq gap while australians experience a huge gap. The average chinese living in australia has iq 110 and the average aborigine has iq 75. So australians see an iq gap more than twice the gap most americans see

TAPPliI agree with other commentators here - the new conservative government wants to reduce the number of asylum seekers, but not the number of legal immigrants. In fact they are just as enthusiastic about mass legal immigration and multi-culturalism as the former leftist government and the mainstream media.

Some people, including myself, advocate a large reduction in legal immigration, but multi-culturalism is a sacred cow here, and anyone who questions it publicly is instantly reviled as a rascist. In other words Australia is like any other western country.

Steve, certainly here in the usa, the democratic party is most focused on increasing the number of genetically low iq immigrants. Such immigrants will reliably vote democratic for generations in the future. The truth is the Republican Party in the US caused a lot of low IQ immigration almost 30 years ago under Ronald Reagan. In fact the biggest supporters of high Hispanic immigration are Grover Norquist, the Bush family, and many of the elite in the Republican Party who want to have a workforce that they think will not vote and they can cut the welfare state. This is the view of the Bush family and Marco Rubio.

Actually, Kern County California shows that you can have Republicans running the placed since the whites in Kern are to the right of Houston or Dallas Texas. Kern County whites came from Oklahoma. Kern only has two industries, farming and agricultural and Kevin McCarthy supports the legalization because of agricultural interests.Mexicans in Kern vote at lower levels than whites in Kern. Republicans think if they legalized illegals for work that the rest of the US will look like Kern County.

I am not an expert in the australian labor market, but have been told that for tough hard young men there are hundred thousand dollar a year jobs in mining camps. However for soft metrosexual artsy young men, there is a super high cost of living and rampant unemployment in sydney. Huge bifurcation in the market, Can australians confirm this?

I wouldn't call it a bifurcation. It's a continuum, with men willing and able to do the fly-in-fly-out mining jobs at one end and the usual dearth of opportunities for arty types that applies, I think, in every Western country at the other. Business-oriented men with degrees fall in between. They have about the same entry-level opportunities they would in other Anglo countries. Upward mobility is limited by our small population size and, to some extent, a culture that neither values nor rewards success as much as American and British culture seem to.

The FIFO lifestyle is not for most men, any more than most men want to be Ice Road Truckers, or whatever the latest "most dangerous job" is you have in America.

The real difference I've noticed is that working class jobs in Australia generally pay more than they do in the US. It's still possible to earn a decent living without a university degree here, just as it used to be in the States.

It's so obvious that it hardly needs saying, but the lack of low-skill immigrants is the main cause of this.

"The real difference I've noticed is that working class jobs in Australia generally pay more than they do in the US. It's still possible to earn a decent living without a university degree here, just as it used to be in the States.

It's so obvious that it hardly needs saying, but the lack of low-skill immigrants is the main cause of this."

Is it fair to say, apples to apples, that pretty much all young men with iq under 109 are better off being born in australia than in the usa ? I life better in australia for the ones that want to work hard and also better for the slackers?

I am not an expert in the australian labor market, but have been told that for tough hard young men there are hundred thousand dollar a year jobs in mining camps. However for soft metrosexual artsy young men, there is a super high cost of living and rampant unemployment in sydney. Huge bifurcation in the market, Can australians confirm this?

The 100K mining jobs are pretty much exclusively in Western Australia (WA). They are not advertised and go to inside runners, that is those people with connections already inside.

As stated in the other Oz thread, WA-and Perth in particular-has become an outpost of the British Isles and other Brit colonies. Cost of living in Perth is very high as a result of the FIFO wages.

Btw, mining is not as rugged-manly-tough as you may think.

The rest of Oz is referred to Oz as a 2 speed, even 5 speed, economy.

If you're in the govt sector times have been grand - Canberra has benefited the most. This should change given Abbott's indication that he's going to gut the public sector, something I'm very much looking forward to :-)

Large working class areas of Victoria, NSW and QLD have 20% plus youth unemployment. These aren't "metrosexual artsy young men" but muslim rif raf, massive amounts of all sort of migrants, and traditional White Ozzies.

The "metrosexual artsy young men" in inner-city Melb, Sydney, and Brisbane are doing rather well in the banking sector and living off gov't arts grants, as well as huge govt incentives for "Green" activities. Abbott has promised to starve the latter two, but the former banking ranks will do well out of him, however being slowly replaced by as they are by foreign corporations and locally by HBD immigrants.

If the arse falls out of the mining sector then the arse falls out of Oz. This is what Labor and Liberal "Free Trade" policies have done to us. We've sold off pretty much all of our industrial and manufacturing business to foreign interests.

Things are not what they seem to those looking at the national budget from afar.

Both Labor and Liberal refer to Oz as "an economy", both detest nation, unless tacked on to "national economy". Australia was sold off long ago, and Abbott will speed the process in whatever is left - though he will stop the boats and rescind the carbon tax, if he can get it through the senate.

So, there is some glittering gold in the otherwise shit stained future.

In fact the biggest supporters of high Hispanic immigration are Grover Norquist, the Bush family, and many of the elite in the Republican Party who want to have a workforce that they think will not vote and they can cut the welfare state.

There is an interesting sidebar to the Oz story. Idiocracy, compounded by the Australian peculiarity of compulsory voting, has thrown an unlikely bunch of misfits into the Senate.

The most absurd example: An unknown independent, who got away with registering a name somewhat similar to that of a major party, received 9% of the vote in a large state where there were dozens of names on the senate ballot paper. You see, this fellow had the good fortune to be drawn at the top of the list where he received what is known as the 'donkey vote'. (I personally prefer the 'Mencken vote'.)

His prodigious mathematical skills have made him a fixture come election time. This year, through his company Independent Liaison, he organised a ''minor party alliance'', which stacked preference flows.

Druery will not say which candidates he advised but relished Dropulich's possible election in WA.

''Dropulich is likely to get the lowest first-preference vote in history and get elected: this afternoon he had 1908 of the 896,345 votes counted in the West and preferences will get him across the line.''

Druery predicted the 76-member Senate chamber, after the changeover next year, would comprise 33 Coalition, 25 Labor, 10 Greens, one Democratic Labor Party, two Palmer United Party, one Liberal Democrats, one Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, one Family First, one Australian Sports Party and independent Nick Xenophon.

Alot of those voting Liberal Democrat in the Senate, mistaking it for Liberal, would be senior citizens imo. I handed out the liberal ticket on the day and it is clear enough how to complete a valid vote. The oldies, though, required a lot of explanation. So, I wouldn't put it down to idiocracy as such.

Btw, it is not compulsory to vote. It is compulsory to have your name checked off the voting roll on election day, if you want to avoid a fine, and that is if you are enrolled to vote.

You don't, however, have to vote. You can walk straight out if you want to.

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